


In the Wars of Long Ago

by athenaiskarthagonensis



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: M/M, after the apocadidn't, don't ask why adam's there he rearranged reality a bit, in that little cottage in the south downs, so his parents wouldn't mind
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 22:04:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19385509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/athenaiskarthagonensis/pseuds/athenaiskarthagonensis
Summary: Just a quick little scene, post-Apocalypse. It's been pointed out that Adam really had no idea who Aziraphale and Crowley were before they took his hands at the end of the world; I think they'd have quite a lot of catching up to do thereafter, and quite a few uncomfortable little conversations to have about their own pasts. Explaining to the boy just who they are, and how they got to where they are... so here's at least one of the things I think Adam might be curious about.





	In the Wars of Long Ago

“So, I’ve got a question,” Adam said slowly, in the way Aziraphale had come to quite nearly dread. It meant the boy had been thinking, which was a very good thing, of course; but it also meant the question was likely to be of the uncomfortably acute sort that adults of all kinds, human, angel, or demon as they might be, disliked having to answer. The sort that made one feel rather like, well, Adam, the first one, right after the bite of apple but before he’d found himself a convenient leaf.

Quite precisely, Aziraphale set his book aside and slipped his spectacles from his nose, folding in their temples and tucking them with care into the pocket of his jacket. In the cottage’s kitchen, he could hear Crowley bustling about, putting together the tea things; oh, they could always miracle up an afternoon tea, yes, but Aziraphale did think it was so much nicer to have the real thing. And wasn’t it lovely that Crowley agreed?

He smiled at the boy, who was, after all, not quite exactly human. (Oh, they’d handled the thing with his father, of course, but had anyone taken the mother’s heritage – or even her identity? – into account?) “Yes, Adam?” he prompted.

“Right. Only, you’re an angel, right?” said Adam, his mop of muddy-gold curls flopping over his ears in a way which made Aziraphale’s fingers itch for scissors.

“If that’s your question, young man…” Aziraphale said, trailing off in that slightly forbidding way common to schoolteachers of a certain ilk the world over.

“No. I mean, yes. Sort of?” Adam said. “Only, there’s these magazines, the ones Anathema reads? She lets me read them too, when she’s done with them, and there’s this one that’s all about angels….”

“Ah,” Aziraphale sighed. “You mustn’t believe everything you read just because it’s been written down, Adam,” he said, well aware of the irony. “People do write the most astonishing tosh at times.”

“The magazine said there were sorts of angel,” Adam continued, a bit stubbornly. “What sort are you?”

“I,” Aziraphale answered, unable to resist straightening his bowtie and tugging lightly at the lapels of his jacket, “am a Principality.” He supposed he still was. It was… sort of like a title and sort of like what he was, right down at the core, all at once. He wasn’t part of the hierarchy anymore but he hadn’t Fallen, not really… more just… sidled slightly to the side, out of the way of things.

“And what’s that do?” Adam asked, evidently getting to the core of his actual question. His eyes were quite keen, and Aziraphale felt that little stir of disquiet poking up its head again.

“Ah, well, a number of things,” he hedged. “We… guide nations, for one, as a sort of, ah, patron angel. I’ve taken a certain interest in England, personally. We’re meant to educate, and serve as… well, guardians, I suppose.”

Adam nodded, but he still looked a bit dissatisfied; Aziraphale braced for what he was certain was coming next. “Only, the magazine said there was this great big war in Heaven, even before there was an Earth at all. It said that the angels were a host, and Anathema says that’s a word for army. You weren’t a soldier though, were you?” he asked, and managed to put so much childish disdain on the word soldier that it came out sounding a four-letter word. 

Aziraphale… winced.

“I was,” he said, his shoulders slumping down very slightly as under a sudden weight. “We all were.”

Adam was silent. “But how could you do that?” he burst then, and maybe it was a trick of the light which made the boy’s eyes seem to gleam a little red in their depths. “Don’t you know what War is?”

“Probably rather better than you do, my dear,” Aziraphale said, rather sharply. Sharply enough, in fact, that the young man actually stopped mid-tirade and blinked at him. “I led a legion of angels in that war. All the Principalities did. It’s what we were for, before we were for this. Rather like you were for ending the world. Do you recall how very difficult it was to fight that? Now imagine that, but you weren’t raised by humans. You weren’t raised at all; you came into existence precisely as you were, knowing from the start just what your glorious purpose was. You’d had no other influences, no other ideas at all, but those. Of course I fought. I was rather good at it, too.”

“Some of them had other ideas,” Adam said, perhaps a shade sullenly, but he’d been impressed and Aziraphale could nearly watch the little gears in the boy’s terrifying brain ticking over and around.

He sagged slightly, only aware at that moment he’d drawn himself into a quite martial posture indeed, straighter and tighter than even his usual impeccable posture. “Some of them did, yes,” he agreed. “The Fallen. The demons. They were the Enemy. They were Evil, and we were Good.” His capitals slotted audibly into place, as they often do when people talk about such concepts. “It’s a very heady thing, young man, to be told that you’re in the right, and someone else is wrong. That you’re part of a group doing what is noble and right and moral, not like those people at all. Those nasty people, who are Them and not Us, and therefore it’s quite all right to kill them.”

“But didn’t you know some of them?” Adam asked, the red flame entirely gone from his eyes now. “From before, I mean? You must have.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale answered, “I did.”

When it was evident the angel wasn’t going to say anything else on that topic, Adam shook his head. “Then how come,” he said, “how come you didn’t fight the second one? Why’d you stop it?”

“You stopped it,” Aziraphale said, but then he sighed. “Because by then, I’d had other ideas. I’d been… raised by humans too, in a way, just like you were. I spent a lot of time figuring out that the difference between good and evil isn’t nearly so nice and clean as they like to pretend it is. It’s entirely possible to do enormous harm in the name of helping, and the other way around, too.”

There was a slight sound, and Aziraphale looked up to find Crowley standing in the doorway with the tea tray, his eyes clearly visible, at least to the angel, through the dark glasses. He smiled at the demon, a little sweetly. “I did have some help figuring that out,” Aziraphale added, “some very patient help.”

“Right,” Crowley said, sauntering in with his lower body seemingly doing all the movement, “only took you about six thousand years or so.” The tea tray chimed musically as he set it down. “Shall I play mother?” he asked the air, proceeding to do so without waiting for answer.

“It takes quite a lot of bravery, my dear,” Aziraphale said to Adam, “to turn your back on everything you were meant to be, and the family you were supposed to be part of. It also takes bravery to decide for yourself what’s right and what’s wrong, because sometimes you’ll still get it wrong, and sometimes you’ll still hurt people without meaning to.”

“If you’re lucky, they’ll forgive you for it anyway, though,” Crowley interjected. “Care for a biscuit?” He popped open a gaily painted tin, a buttery, sugary aroma filling the room at once.

“I’ll take one of each sort!” Adam said, all at once and in the presence of biscuits just a regular little boy again.

“Oh, dear, so will I!” Aziraphale said, his eyes meeting Crowley’s softly as between them, the boy who’d nearly ended everything went diving, sticky-fingered, for his afternoon tea.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a little line stolen from [The Old Song](http://www.gkc.org.uk/gkc/books/oldsong.html) by GK Chesterton, which Neil said Crowley would be thinking of when he was driving from London to Tadfield in a burning car....


End file.
